- Reaction score
- 1,727
If you have a big pile of Lego blocks, there are a multitude of possibilities for what you can make. If you have just a handful of Legos, you can maybe assemble one creation before you run out. But as your pile keeps shrinking, at a certain point you won’t have enough Legos to make anything interesting—just a brick or two to stack together.
The process of making planets is actually somewhat like building a Lego creation. New research in the Astronomical Journal using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) reveals a never-before-seen limit where there simply aren’t enough of the right elements to make rocky planets like Earth.
Stars and their planets form from large clouds of gas and dust floating in space. First, the cloud’s core collapses under gravity to form the central star, and then the remaining material coalesces into planets in orbit around that center. The key takeaway here is that stars and their planets form from the same stuff—that is, whatever mixture of elements we see in the star tells us about the building blocks available for planets in that system.
The amount of metals (which in astronomer lingo means anything heavier than hydrogen and helium) in a star is known as its metallicity. Stellar metallicity is “one of the first knobs we turn when doing all sorts of simulations of stars, disks, and planets,” says Jonathan Brande, an astronomer at the University of Kansas not involved in the new study.
www.popsci.com
The process of making planets is actually somewhat like building a Lego creation. New research in the Astronomical Journal using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) reveals a never-before-seen limit where there simply aren’t enough of the right elements to make rocky planets like Earth.
Stars and their planets form from large clouds of gas and dust floating in space. First, the cloud’s core collapses under gravity to form the central star, and then the remaining material coalesces into planets in orbit around that center. The key takeaway here is that stars and their planets form from the same stuff—that is, whatever mixture of elements we see in the star tells us about the building blocks available for planets in that system.
The amount of metals (which in astronomer lingo means anything heavier than hydrogen and helium) in a star is known as its metallicity. Stellar metallicity is “one of the first knobs we turn when doing all sorts of simulations of stars, disks, and planets,” says Jonathan Brande, an astronomer at the University of Kansas not involved in the new study.
What happens when you don’t have enough ingredients to make a planet?
NASA scientists observe evidence of a 'metallicity cliff' for the first time.
www.popsci.com
